"Image Saturation: Printed Media and Art in the 1960-70s after Han-geijutsu" Exhibition

This event has ended.

The avant-garde art of the 1960s - including contemporary music, butoh and design - crossed disciplines and the boundaries between existing genres, coming to be known as "han-geijutsu" (anti-art). In the 70s, two significant movements came to prominence: "Mono-ha," which exhibited unadorned and unaltered materials as they were, as well as Conceptual Art, which channeled concepts and notions using language and symbols. These movements were however ultimately austere, and might be said to have been fairly far removed from the richness and vivid sensations of more "visual" images. This was a particularly dry spell for painting - which soon became known rather brusquely as "2D work." From the front lines of art scene, painting was forced to make an unceremonious retreat, which resulted in an apparent loss of compositional and imaginative power for painting and painterly images.

Yet even as these forms of visual imagery were on the decline, they had not disappeared. Tadanori Yokoo's series of theater posters were stolen each time they were put up, and serial illustrations adorned the pages of Playboy. Other notable incidents revolving around "painterly" images include Genpei Akasegawa's "Model Thousand Yen Note" and the Sakura Gahou incident that prompted the recall and collection of the Asahi Journal. These instances of visual culture were omnipresent in the underground theater and butoh scenes, became closely intertwined the seminal events of the time, such as the US-Japan security treaty conflict and the student unrest of 1968 - up to a point where the distribution and circulation of these various images led to a total saturation of the media that promulgated them.

This exhibition introduces visual imagery from the 1960s and 70s created by artists like Kiyoshi Awatsu, Hiroshi Nakamura, Tsunehisa Kimura, Tiger Tateishi, Yoshiharu Tsuge and Akira Uno. On display are materials in a variety of media: posters, books (and their bindings), magazines (and illustrations), paintings, prints and art objects.